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OpenOffice is the absolute best outside of MS Office. However, nothing can do 100% of what MS Office can do. If you need MS Office, there is no true substitute. If you can use an alternative, OpenOffice is the only reasonable option.

Try out OpenOffice and see if it meets your needs. It does for 99% of people. It is extremely rare that someone is using the crazy power user options that only MS Office supports. But when you do... you just have to use MS Office.

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Haven't used it and from the looks of their website I would go with any of their stuff.

I can't fathom any scenario where this would be a good idea... the office market has distilled to two products, MS Office when you have the budget and OpenOffice/Libreoffice when you don't. OpenOffice is 100% free and amazingly good. It is the only acceptable alternative to MS Office. Since it is free, anything that does less and costs anything should be ruled out instantly.

The Office market is one of the most mature markets out there, like email. And like email it has distilled to only two products: Exchange (expensive) and Zimbra (free.) Once the best or second best product is free and standard, there really is no need to look to other products.

I've not used Ashampoo Office, but I have used Libre Office and Open Office. Both will work with Microsoft Office Documents very well. Not really answering your question, but just wanted to provide another alternative.

OpenOffice is the absolute best outside of MS Office. However, nothing can do 100% of what MS Office can do. If you need MS Office, there is no true substitute. If you can use an alternative, OpenOffice is the only reasonable option.

Try out OpenOffice and see if it meets your needs. It does for 99% of people. It is extremely rare that someone is using the crazy power user options that only MS Office supports. But when you do... you just have to use MS Office.

A couple of years ago when I worked for a global company we tested open office, as the MS Office was costing us millions. We were using lotus note for email so that wasn't a concern.

In the end we stuck with office because the majority of businesses world wide uses it, and there was a few thinks we found changed such as formatting when going back and forth. They weren't major problems but it was enough to continue with MS Office.

Tech1313 - I have been looking into this project as well. Going with OpenOffice instead of MS Office. MS is just getting entirely too expensive and they change things way too often (not that we need all the new updates) but its annoying.

Things to consider:
- What do you use for your email now and what will you go to
- How many columns / rows do your excel worksheets have
- Check that your Macro's you use will work with the new product
- Will all of the formulas change over

I think it could be a good change and save a lot of money. Plus i personally like how OpenOffice looks since they dont have that FREAKING RIBBON BAR!!! I think not having to explain the ribbon bar to uses will save time in itself but how many more problems will i create out of this. I am trying to find an email client that will work with exchange right now. I just installed evolution but it says we have an exchange 5.5 connector and that it only works with exchange 2000/2003. I know we have an exchange 2007 but I am looking into if this will work now. Let me know what you come up with and I will let you know what I come up with and maybe we can also help everyone else on here.... Altho, MS might raise their costs if that many people start using OpenOffice....LOL

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About five years ago I was in a you can "spend what you save situation", while ending a install what you want from where ever you get it environment, we went with OpenOffice as the option that we could afford at the time, a few teething issues mainly users saying "I could do this with MS but it's not in OO" 95% wrongly claimed, and a few formatting issues. We moved onto GoOO and then to LibreOffice to cover some issues that were created by advancement of MS office. It has been a good solution for us, but I am now looking at going back to MS office, mainly due to the level of dominance that it now has, for example several of our suppliers are now sending us Excel Catalogues with clever macro tools for pricing, these don't work in OO or any varation (if anyone has any suggestions....), our document management system has a bug that is being blamed on us using OO and fixing it looks like it could be a money black hole, and the formatting issues are getting worse.

I would not consider paying for an MS office alternative without ruling out LibreOffice first, and if you rule out LibreOffice I would be amazed if you can get away with anything other than MS office.

OpenOffice is the absolute best outside of MS Office. However, nothing can do 100% of what MS Office can do. If you need MS Office, there is no true substitute. If you can use an alternative, OpenOffice is the only reasonable option.

Try out OpenOffice and see if it meets your needs. It does for 99% of people. It is extremely rare that someone is using the crazy power user options that only MS Office supports. But when you do... you just have to use MS Office.

Most of our client PCs are using OpenOffice. However, because Quickbooks will only Export reports to Excel, I have had to spend the money to put MSO on several clients. Outlook also has the Hotmail/Windows Live connector which I use for the management Windows Phone devices to synch their contacts and calendars.

Most of our client PCs are using OpenOffice. However, because Quickbooks will only Export reports to Excel, I have had to spend the money to put MSO on several clients. Outlook also has the Hotmail/Windows Live connector which I use for the management Windows Phone devices to synch their contacts and calendars.

If anyone knows of a way to get QB to export to OO Id be thrilled!

Have you tested its export? OO reads Excel. I'd be surprised if QB did anything that OO didn't support.

Yeah, we tried. If a client only has OO installed, QB exporting to Excel doesn't work. Once you install MSO, it works just fine. Of course, anything exported to Excel on a client that has it can be sent to an OO-only client and those documents can be opened and edited. It's just getting an instance of QB to export directly to OO within a given client. I can only guess that QB is set to look for Excel in some way during the export process. Interestingly, there are other features in QB that will interact with both Outlook and Thunderbird, but that is far simpler as there are no consideration for macros/formulas/etc. Perhaps OO compatibility is in the works...

Yeah, we tried. If a client only has OO installed, QB exporting to Excel doesn't work. Once you install MSO, it works just fine. Of course, anything exported to Excel on a client that has it can be sent to an OO-only client and those documents can be opened and edited. It's just getting an instance of QB to export directly to OO within a given client. I can only guess that QB is set to look for Excel in some way during the export process. Interestingly, there are other features in QB that will interact with both Outlook and Thunderbird, but that is far simpler as there are no consideration for macros/formulas/etc. Perhaps OO compatibility is in the works...

Ah, the issue then isn't that QB exports to Excel but that QB doesn't export to Excel and needs Excel to do this for it. That's the crappiest of crappy methods for that stuff. They leave out in their brochures that ownership of MS Office is required for QB to function.